The Dark Rites of Cthulhu Read Free Page A

cellar.
    Jake stood in a firing crouch, emptying a clip into the corner. I drew my own gun and joined in, despite not being able to see anything but darker shadow. My ears rang, almost deafened by the shots in the close confinement. All too quickly my trigger pulled on empty. The echoes died away leaving dead silence behind.
    Jake and I stood in a quiet, empty cellar that suddenly felt warm and stifling. We took one look at each other and headed for the steps at a run. He beat me to it, just, but I was level by the time we barrelled through the hallway and stumbled, almost fell, out into the driveway. A blanket of cold stars mocked us from on high as we drove off, leaving a squeal of tires in our wake.
     
    "What the fuck just happened?"
    O'Hara's bar again, and more of the black stuff, helped down with whiskey. Jake hadn't spoken since we left the cellar, but at least his hands stopped shaking as we headed into the second pint of Guinness.
    "Magician's tricks and fucking hocus-pocus," he said. "That's what fucking happened. I told you there was something hinky going on, I fucking told you."
    What I'd seen—and felt—back in the cellar was a bit more than hinky , but I knew when to keep my mouth shut, if nothing else.
    "We're onto something," Jake said. "Somebody just tried to warn us off."
    "Actually, I think they succeeded," I said, and got more of the Guinness inside me, trying to make a warm spot in a body that still held too much memory of dancing a cold empty vastness.
    Jake took out the small notebook—I'd forgotten all about it, but he'd had it in his pocket the whole time.
    "This is it," he said. "This is the thing that will crack the case open for us."
    I wasn't sure where he was getting his certainty, but I trusted his instincts. He started to rifle through the pages.
    "Maybe we should just leave it alone?" I said. "I saw something back there. I…"
    "I don't want to know," Jake replied. It wasn't fear in his eyes this time—it was pleading. "Whatever we saw, it was just a trick. What else could it be?"
    That was a question I asked myself all the way home. I fell into bed, but sleep was a long time in coming. When I finally drifted off, I fell into dreams of dancing galaxies, naked women lying on crudely carved circles, and Jake's dead eyes staring up at me through my tears.
     
    I didn't feel rested on wakening, and when I got to work we caught a drive-by shooting that took us most of the morning to wrap up. When we finally got a quiet minute back at the precinct, Jake pulled me aside next to the coffee machine.
    "I showed Kaspervitch the notebook. He says it's a simple substitution cipher. He's working on it now. We should get the gen in an hour or so."
    "And then what?" I asked. I was weary. I couldn't see an end on Jake's current path that I liked, and I kept seeing that last dream, of him in the coffin. I started to get a real bad feeling, and what I wanted more than anything else was to just lose myself in the daily grind and forget all about the Mitchell case. But Jake was my partner, and that bought him a lot of slack. I decided to back his play—for the time being at least.
    He hadn't noticed my reticence.
    "I told you—we'll crack this case wide open. We're onto something. I feel it in my water."
    All I felt in mine was cold, a deep chill that even copious amounts of black coffee wouldn't shift. Jake whispered something as we went back to our desks. I didn't quite catch it, and didn't know how important it would prove.
    "I've seen it."
     
    "It's a diary," Kaspervitch said, dropping the notebook on Jake's desk and making Jake's fifty disappear into an inside pocket. "Dates and places, I'm guessing of some kind of business meetings, for a lot of the names in his email contacts turn up in there too. But if they are business meetings, the times and places are off—unless I've made a mistake, all these meetings take place in quiet spots, in the middle of the night."
    Jake looked up at me and